What Helps the Poor? Augustine on Begging and Begging the Question Matthew Elmore, MA and ThD student in ethics and political theology at Duke Divinity School

My essay will examine two repeated scenes. We have all been a player in the first: in some urban setting, we are approached by an unstable figure asking for a handout. Immediately, we must choose whether and how to provide direct care. That scene, that dilemma, leads to my second reference point: Augustine’s pastoral work in Hippo. Augustine’s homilies on almsgiving are unique from one another, just as every encounter with a beggar is unique. But general themes do emerge, and it is my task to outline them. Reflecting on scene one, I will probe for an answer in scene two.

All of that is adjoined to the claim that for Christians, ‘the poor’ is a demographic which has always been medically imbricated. Early hospitals did not arise in response to illness but poverty. Even in our secular age, we have learned to make poverty legible in medical terms. It can be linked statistically with mental illness and diet-related disease, graphed on plots with other medicalized problems like addiction, malnutrition, transience, broken support systems and so on. But despite all the specialties of modern medicine, our care for the beggar defies bureaucratic safety. It is unregulated and therefore precarious, due to the fact that our encounter is defined by no office except that of caregiver. We are merely pedestrians with no medical algorithm.

For help, my essay turns to Augustine’s very pragmatic preaching on what to do, which is embedded in his account of human equality and privation. His treatment of poverty is not simple, and neither is his treatment of almsgiving. He recognizes the extreme confusion and discomfort inflicted by the beggar, but in short, Augustine believes poverty is not exactly an illness to cure. The poor are a pain we will always have with us. And although that sentiment sounds pessimistic to our modern and medicalized ears, it is precisely how Augustine empowers his parish to persist in charity-shaped suffering. ​Christian sociologist Mark Mulder was recently asked the following question: “What resources or first steps might help churches reexamine their assumptions about income inequality and why people are poor?” His response was incisive if indeed elusive of the question. “I’d suggest looking at how generously the early church gave,” he said. “They thought of themselves as giving to Christ.” In that spirit, I will present Augustine’s response to poverty as a complex of faithful painfulness.